By Tom
I estimate that the fall from the Taylor-Southgate Bridge would take about two, maybe three, terrifying seconds. So far I’ve done an admirable job staving off my suicidal ideations, but this one creeps up on me. A couple years ago I jumped out of a plane thirty miles outside of Las Vegas. I told myself it cured my fear of falling, but what it really did was convince my brain that falling to death–at its worst–takes only a minute. An agonizing and horrifying minute, one that feels like a hundred years, but still a minute. Scaling it down, the hardest and most time-consuming part about jumping into the Ohio River would be climbing the four and a half foot steel railing on its sides and willing the nerve to fall sixty feet into scaly green water. Everything after is cake. Eternity awaits, welcome to the Big Nothing.
Again, these are only ideations. They flare up now and then, usually at my soul-flailing sales job. I’ve been there for 8 years. Since 2005, the Suicide Hotline has received over 20,000,000 calls, most of them, I would bet, involve money.
We’re entering the second to last day of a road-trip that my friends and I have been on. This is a trip we cannot afford, but did so anyway. Millennials have a knack for taking vacations since Covid, usually more often and longer than preceding generations–about 34 days annually. They (we?) also spend less money on vacations, with sites like CNBC using catch-all terms like “mental health” and “experiences”. This trip has been anything but a sabbatical. We’ve spent the last five days tearing ass through eight states and the Appalachians.
It’s surely something we felt we had to do. I think that’s the important distinction to be made about why two early thirty-somethings, one with a family, and two older twenty-somethings felt compelled to plan for the better part of a calendar year on a road trip–in a Toyota Rav-4. It’s a trip where most of the garnishment of “experiences” will be had on the road. Life is endless, boundless pressure that must be released.
My roommate Josh, one of the twenty-somethings, suggested the trip as a cool thing to do for our podcast, The Worst Fans in Baseball. Our seasonal co-host Ryan thought so too. We ran the numbers and drew up a plan: Cooperstown or Bust, with many pit-stops along the way–everyone on this trip likes to shit. We’d stop in Louisville for a minor league game from the Cincinnati Reds AAA-affiliate (the Louisville Bats, who at one point were part of the St. Louis Cardinals), Pittsburgh for a Pirates-Braves game, New York to see the Mets and Giants, Cooperstown for a day of regaling in Baseball’s Mecca, and then a marathon run to Cincinnati to watch our beloved Cards play the Reds.
2,400 miles and 40 hours of travel numerous states and a time zone. Perhaps more after rest stops. We spent maybe a total of 30 hours sleeping or trying to sleep–we all have sleep apnea, and, to save money, we thought it smart to share beds. The rest of the 70-something waking hours we had for the week were these experiences—the New York subway, a Hampton Inn & Suites in Oneonta, and sneaking into parts of stadiums we had no business being.
It took us about 5 hours to reach our first destination in Louisville. We went to Louisville Slugger Field, home to the Bats–the Reds AAA affiliate. They were playing the Toledo Mud Hens–Detroit Tigers. After checking into the hotel we found that our toilet didn’t work.
Our hotel was on the outskirts of Louisville, part of a massive shopping center complete with all franchises and amenities that well-to-do middle class white people look for. Our room was clean and plastic looking, everything perfectly polished. I told Ryan the rooms reminded me of One Cardinal Tower, the massive 30-something story apartment complex that hogged the centerfield skyline behind Busch Stadium. For $1,500 a month you can live in a hotel sized apartment with all the authoritarian rules that come with it–no smoking within 50 feet of the premises, all guests must be logged, $50 fine for noisy pets, etc.
We call an Uber, a black Bronco driven by a towering man with a syrupy accent. Josh, who is bigger than us, squeezed in the middle of Nick and I. Josh complained, we all complained. By the time we got to Louisville stadium, getting out of the Bronco felt like taking off a bra after a long day.
Our seats ran down the first base line and were $15. The concourse under the main gate featured numerous banners of Bats players that broke into the majors: TJ Friedl, Eugenio Suarez, Todd Frazier, Joey Votto, Hunter Greene, Homer Bailey, and Elly De La Cruz. A few concession stands, some of them of the self-checkout variety, and a couple bars that were serving $6 margaritas. The line for that stretch passed third base.
The local denizens in attendance are not cut from the same cloth as your average MLB fan. Most people bring umbrellas, coolers, and they wear jeans and overalls. The only distinguishing badge of fandom being the Bats’ red ball caps, which most of everyone have. Children run between the bleachers tossing a foam football, families here can spread out and feed off the park’s relaxing aura. It’s not a professional baseball game insofar as a senior legion or collegiate league–hell, even high school varsity. It’s a working class vibe. Older guys grumble at groundouts and check swings, they say things like “cut the ball in half” and “keep your head up” and “pick ‘em up, Bats let’s go.”
There are no brats being served so we settle for Nathan hot dogs and 16 oz Miller Lite cans. The Bats played a game earlier and so the second game was a 7-inning double header. A shot down the right field line curls into foul territory beyond the pole where some kids in dirty shirts leap on the ball. The first base ump calls it fair, after an appeal the call is reversed and Bats manager Pat Kelly comes out and gets ejected, putting on a gallant display of pageantry, even pantomiming his ejection by throwing out both umpires. By the 6th inning we decide to explore and Ryan shows us a superpower he said he acquired from his father: the ability to walk into places you’re not supposed to be and not get caught.
Under Ryan’s guidance, we moved to the clubhouse seats of the Bats Stadium into a bar just beside the press and TV box. There’s a buffet inside. We sneak onto the upper mezzanine where we drink a couple more Miller Lites and watch the Bats win on a walk-off sac fly in the 8th inning. We laugh about being up here and make cruel jokes about saying shit where the MiLB broadcast could hear us. I pay for an Uber XL and we ride comfortably back to the hotel where we find the toilet still doesn’t work.
Josh and Nick head for a very late dinner and Ryan uses another superpower gifted to him by his father: lying. The hotel sends someone up to give us another room and says we can just move everything there. Ryan says, “But not all of us are here, what about them?” the staffer says, “Well you can just call down to the desk when they do and they can make the switch.” Ryan closes the door and turns to me and says, “We’re not fucking telling them that.” We laugh, grab our things and take the free room.
Day two is a killer. For starters the Pirates game we thought started at 1 pm is actually 4 pm. The worst of it all is that we’re leaving Pittsburgh and traveling to New York City right after. 13 hours of driving and only a couple hours of baseball.
Josh takes the first leg of this drive with Nick, who lived in New York for a couple years, taking the second. We take I-71 to Cincinnati and Columbus, before jumping on I-70 to ride to Pittsburgh.
The ride is mostly unimpressive, save for the skylines we see in both Cincy and Pittsburgh. We kill time with jokes and spoonerisms—our favorite game, such as taking a song and making it gay i.e. PUSA’s “Peaches” and singing Move into the country/ Gonna suck me a lot of penis. We do bits, tons of those, and start a kill-list of politicians and stand-up comedians who’ll “get the wall” whenever we bring about a communist revolution. We do this for 6 hours. There’s not much to be impressed about Ohio and Pennsylvania. Every state looks the same compared to Missouri, they even share towns with the same names: Lebanon, Fredericktown, Cuba, etc.
On I-376 we barrel through the Squirrel Hill and Fort Pitt Tunnels, coming out of 4,000 feet of darkness to the Pittsburgh skyline. We think it’s pretty cool, until we have to navigate through Pittsburgh, and a couple hours later, spend forty-five minutes trying to leave it.
Time for some city-coded autism.
Pittsburgh is a color-coordinated city, replete with big gothic buildings and infrastructure ordained in yellow painted steel. Their bridges are yellow, each of their professional sports teams are yellow (and black), their rivers USED TO BE yellow. It’s fascinating that forty years ago over 600,000 people lived here–from 1900 to 1950, Pittsburgh was the anywhere between the 12th or 8th most populous city in the US. Like with all Rust Belt cities–that’s what we should be calling this trip, the Rust Belt Run–there’s plenty of empty space leftover from hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to the suburbs.
Folks left for all sorts of reasons. In the 1940s Pittsburgh’s steel industry, strengthened by immigration and economic black refugees fleeing the US South, became the primary component to America’s “arsenal of democracy.” The city was also filthy, compacting all the environmental calamities you’d expect from a place whose primary focus was its ore industry. Pittsburgh cleaned up its rivers and pollution, and when the steel industry imploded in the 1970s, they turned to education, robotics, and tourism. The metro-area grew–the Fort Pitt Tunnel lies directly under the Duquesne Heights Neighborhood–even against the wishes of the uneven topography. Downtown Pittsburgh is perhaps the only flat piece of land in the city. Looking back across the Monongahela River, we see cable cars, paths, roads, and steps–so many steps–moving up and down the surface of Mount Washington. It’s said that Pittsburgh “lies unevenly on unruly land” with most of the city and her surrounding municipalities sitting on rugged land between 700 and 1,300 feet above sea level.
There are 10 skyscrapers in Pittsburgh that are at least 500 feet in height. The city bolsters one of the largest skylines in the United States because of it. Most of them were constructed after 1960 when globalization and the steel market cratered. The one that catches our eye is the PPG Place, a large commercial complex named after its core tenant PPG Industries. It was completed right as the population drain hit its apex in 1983. Its flagship is One PPG Place, a 635 foot steel monstrosity with fixed points at each corner.
“That’s some real Dark Knight shit right there,” I say. Ryan tells me they used the backdrop of the city for Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises. Nick confirms it.
PPG is the third tallest building in Pittsburgh. There’s the US Steel Tower (841 feet) which sat as the tallest skyscraper in Pennsylvania for 13 years until Philadelphia’s downtown boom of the 1980s and 1990s saw it dwarfed by the Comcast Center and Liberty Place. You can pick this one out because it has UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medicine) stamped at the top. BNY Mellon sits at 725 feet and houses the corporate HQ for Mellon Financial, who merged with the Bank of New York in 2007.
These buildings, along with the dozen or so bridges that connect Downtown Pittsburgh with the rest of the world, are what make PNC Park mesmerizing. The ballpark is consistently voted as one of the best stadiums to visit as a fan, despite it being under the thumb of one of baseball’s most ghoulish owners.
It’s a Saturday. We park in a massive garage off General Robinson Street and hoof it to the stadium. We’re here early, having left Louisville around 7 in the morning. Federal Street and General Robinson are shut down to limited traffic as Pirates fans and their families coalesce outside, drinking beer and getting in line. There’s a stage about halfway up to the Roberto Clemente Bridge with a band getting ready. It’s at this point Ryan comes to the conclusion of something.
“Wow, it’s like other teams have the best fans in baseball,” he says. He’s making fun of Cardinal fans, who have insulated themselves for so long within their own asses.
“Yeah, we have to go back and tell everyone about this, that there’s baseball fans outside of St. Louis.”
We stop at the North Shore Tavern. It is packed with gold and black. Nick and I go to the bathroom, when we come out Ryan and Josh are holding down a table in the corner.
Josh sports a shit-eating grin, “Dude, Ryan did it again.”
“What?”
He tells us Ryan hocked the table. He points to the waitress and says, “she said this table was reserved and Ryan said someone sat us here.”
“Oh so he lied,” I say.
“I totally fucking lied,” Ryan says and laugh.
We slam some beer along with their patented Yinzer wraps. Yinzer–if you’re not in the know–is what Pittsburghers refer to themselves; it’s an antiquated term born from Scottish-Irish immigrants, often referred to plurally as “yunz” and eventually became yinz and then yinzer. Yinzers have distinct accents, I’m told, but frankly I did not possess the capabilities to notice. I’ll instead state that Pittsburgh is just a prettier St. Louis and that the Yinzer dialect is a mere fabrication.
We walk the Roberto Clemente Bridge and think about buying knock-off Pirates gear. The game is in a rain-delay so we enter PNC through the concourse and begin exploring. We hit up a shop and go around the pedestrian ramps–much to Josh’s chagrin, whom he feels is a blight on the ballpark. We drink beer, lots of beer, and local beer at that too (I.C. Light mainly). I start swiping on dating apps and stop myself and say, “Why the fuck are you doing this?”
We are feeling great.
The Pirates honor Dave Parker and the 1979 World Series team. We get Dave Parker bobbleheads, which will eventually get crushed by all the luggage we’re hauling in the Rav-4. Important bit to note, that during Parker’s announcement–which he’s in person for despite battling Parkinsons–the PA makes a point that Parker should be in the MLB Hall of Fame but is not.
“We’ll be sure to ask them,” I say. No one in the Right Field bleachers care. The rain has stopped and the sun is beating down on us, we are beginning to cook. One of the Pirates being honored is John Candelaria, who I remembered sticking up for sportswriter Lisa Saxon when she was being harassed by Reggie Jackson. Following ‘79 Parker was the second MLB player to sign a contract with an AAV greater than a million bucks. He was pretty beat-up in ‘81 and ‘82, prompting frustrated fans to throw shit at him. I wonder if all the pageantry today is a mea culpa for that? Parker left Pittsburgh pretty sour, eventually signing with the Reds where he endured the racist shenanigans of the pompous Hiterlite Marge Schott–she infamously referred to Parker as a “million-dollar…” well, you can probably guess it.
We make a point to leave the game before 6:30 because we don’t give much of a shit to see the Pirates play. We explore the stadium more, take a couple dumps in their relatively clean bathrooms. We met-up with leftist Twitter user Lauren (@Very_Regular) who let’s us crash her vibe session. She asked us if we had the Renegade Hot Dog? We say no and asked what it was. She said it’s a hot dog topped with pot roast, pickles, and pierogies, Pittsburgh’s other greatest export. This was a missed opportunity.
Clouds set in and grow dark. We look at our weather radars and figure we have twenty minutes to beat the rain. We leave around 5:45 and get to the Rav™ just as the rain begins to fall. Josh struggles to get out of the city, as his Apple Maps continues to verbally relay confusing directions to him. I tell him the key is to–dangerously might I add–look at the map on the screen. We cross half of the bridges in Pittsburgh before we finally get out of the city. Nick takes over and powers through the rest of Pennsylvania and New Jersey before having to tap out.
“I can’t see very well,” he says, “And I’m in a lot of pain.” He has an auto-immunte disorder that gives him debilitating heartburn. He has a padded sensor for it and some painkillers. Sitting for prolonged periods is murderous on him. It’s pitch black, probably close to 11:30 when he tells me. At this point I’ve sobered up enough and said I’ll take over and guide the rest of the Boys Voyage. I drive us through Jersey, Staten Island, and the JFK Expressway until we finally reach our Air BNB at about 1:30 in the morning. We have three separate rooms and a couch that Nick lays claim to. We pass out and I lie in bed looking at my bank account.
Josh took the brunt for the trip. He paid for all the hotels and travel and didn’t have us settle up with him until the end of the trip. Ryan covered the tickets. PNC was about $40. We have all been penny-pinching as best we can. We brought snacks, beer, water, half-and-half Arizona tea, probiotic sodas, seltzers, chips, trail mix, and Twizzlers for the trip. They all served a great purpose in limiting our stops for snacks and food.
I spent about $1,200 on the trip in total. That’s the conservative estimate, things could have been so much worse if I had more money. Travel, hotel, and gas was half that, the other was ballpark food, memorabilia, dining out, drinking booze, and sports gambling (Ryan and I on a budget of $50).
There’s a litany of reasons why I had the thoughts I had on the Taylor-Southgate Bridge. My parents were terrible with money and that got downloaded on to me, and I spent my college years running up a lot of credit card debt to survive but also—to quote CNBC—“garner experiences.” I held this mindset through my twenties, even after I got a middle class paying job. I didn’t start taking steps to reprogram this behavior until I approached my thirties. Prior to that, it didn’t cost me much because I lived fiscally cheap with my best friend at the time. The past is never quite through with us, and in the end it cost me a long-term relationship, peace of mind, and—my most precious commodity—time.
The human experience would be better with more time. Time is life, and it runs out eventually. Four-day and thirty-hour work weeks, UBI, universal healthcare and education, mandatory paid leave, the elimination of retail bureaucracy would exist in a just world—sorry, in the United States. Spending time on the phone getting a rebate, rescheduling a bill payment, or bitching to (insert company here)’s customer service. So much of our human lives are spent wallowing on hold, sitting in traffic, and/or doing a monotonous bullshit job for 8 hours a day. We really don’t have to live like this. If life is all about experiencing it, you can’t do much of it when you’re spending 70% of your life working. Dave Ramsey doesn’t mention that—and for the record, he’s someone who gets The Wall.
This is a very millennial position to have. A week before the trip Josh and I grumbled about our personal finances, and part of me thought we were both fishing for an excuse to cancel the trip—Ryan also said something to the effect of “I totally can’t do this either,” when I mentioned my anxiety too. I worked in St. Louis the week of the trip, and I won’t lie, I thought about calling it off just because I didn’t know if I had a path forward to surviving another month. I kept thinking: Will you have enough for rent? Will you be able pay X off? Will you have enough leftover for mom’s house insurance payment? And those thoughts would metastasize into: Why did you do this? Why are you such a fucking retard? You’re just like your mother. And sometimes the worst thought is, Why are you like this? something my ex would say to me often. Financial anxiety is also a very millennial thing to have.
There is no help coming either. Baby Boomers own over half the wealth in the US, but that’s not getting passed on to Gen Xers and Millennials. Boomers want to live forever, it’s the only way they can continue to spite themselves and everyone else. Thanks to a very kind and loving system they spent decades cultivating, all their wealth is going to be sucked up in probate, medical debt, and funeral costs. When this generation is finally, truly gone, their estates will be cannibalized by Centene Corp, a local greedy surgeon, assisted living centers, or even the state itself. Baby Boomers have always been susceptible to scams, and in death they will be players to the biggest one of them all.
I still don’t know why I decided to go through with the trip. At the end of the day I guess it was about experiences and sharing them. I think that’s the sole reason we all decided to go through with it. Time is precious and finite and can end randomly and suddenly. So why not? Just go for it. Pay me now or pay me later. It’ll all be okay. Don’t jump just yet.
In New York we get a whole day to ourselves and a Mets game at 1 pm. Nick gives us a crash course on how the bus and subway lines work. His auto-immune disease gets the best of him, and he taps out of the game entirely, but agrees to get us from the F-train to the 7-train that takes us to Mets-Willets Point. We ride the Q3 and look at what St. Albans and Jamaica have to offer. Nick tells us that Queens in general is very safe except for Jamaica South, the only place he describes as “rough.”
New York is as kinetic and diverse as you’d imagine. It’s easy to see how Boomers would be terrified of it. Later in the day we’ll get off the subway at 169th in a predominantly Indian and Middle Eastern neighborhood (women in hijabs, street and shop vendors, the various smells of food and people, etc). The neighborhood we’re staying in, St. Albans, is overwhelmingly black along with its surrounding neighborhoods. Living most of my life in and around St. Louis, this isn’t much of a culture shock, nor are the chaotic driving elements to the city. People here do not seem to be genuinely bothered by one another, they’re just in a hurry to get somewhere.
The 7-train is jam-packed with Mets fans. We walked through a garden to Citi Field. We took pictures of each other and the original Home Run Apple outside the main gate. We complain too. We complain about not being able to drink around the stadium, the lack of food and bars in Flushing, but mainly the limited gate entrances, which are barriered off to create the illusion that there are shit ton of people at the game–the attendance for this game is listed at 41,016 but I’d ballpark it closer to 30K.
“It’s like they had something terrible happen in this city and they don’t want it to happen again,” Ryan says oozing with sarcasm.
Inside, Citi Field is ugly and dark with little to no natural sunlight. Moving through the park feels like moving through an airport. We eventually go through the Delta Sky360 Club, an enormous venue with high, well-lit ceilings and numerous tables.
Josh pipes in, “I know this is gonna sound bad, but all the chicks here are ugly. I have not seen one good-looking chick.” We laugh and Ryan comes to the defense. “You have to go outside a bit, there’s plenty of 10s out there.” Later in the day, when Josh brings this up around Nick, he’s accosted and told, “New York is full of beautiful women. Every midwestern 7 or 8 moves here but none of the hot guys do. It’s just dudes.”
I tell Josh that I haven’t cared to take inventory of the local trim, but that everyone here “looked like troglodytes, there’s no fucking sunlight in this place.”
It should be noted that this level of objectification and minor ableism should be carried with a grain of salt. We have spent so much of our online baseball lives shitting on the Mets and their fans. We look at the Mets with the same prejudice as our ancestors looked at Chuck Berry. It is the Cardinal Way after all.
Once we ascend through Citi Field’s colon the view improves tenfold. We’re hanging in the middle mezzanine in left-center. To our left is Citi Field’s ginormous–and I don’t mean that lightly–videoboard. This fucking monstrosity is over 24,000 square feet and standing in its shadow is like standing in awe of some ancient Eldritch god.
Citi Field dwarfs Busch Stadium easily by 20 or 25%. It’s a tremendously large and spacious ballpark when you come out of it. There’s a mythological element to traversing its hellish depths only to spring out of it into some blinding nirvana with concrete patios and chopped cheeses. The view is gorgeous, the stadium sits higher than any sporting venue I’ve been in. As we near game time we slug some beers and eat chicken tenders. Our section begins filling up. We’re all carrying the souvenir of the day: A Hello Kitty bobblehead–the head doesn’t bobble, instead it’s an arm that waves frantically.
It’s here that I’ll likely lose some of you. Mets fans are a particular kind of sad, and for what it’s worth it’s very endearing. We’re told directly by them that they’re cursed, but fuck it, they’re here and they love their Mets. The section fills up with a diverse span of people. In front of us are some guys, likely around our age, dripping with East Coast accents—unlike those Yinzer bastards. Beside them is a Latino or Italian family—it sounds bad, but it’s the Scorsese rule, baby—with the grandfather and his grandson directly in front of us. To our left and right are people like us–gooey white slobs. It’s a real smorgasbord of people. It’s New York City, baby.
The guys around our age are critters like us. After a Tomas Nido throwing error leads to a run, we get the full New York fan experience as one of them–wearing a Pete Alonso jersey–stands up and shouts, “Nido you bum! Get off the team! You’re hitting less than .600 (OPS) and you can’t throw!” Later in the game, when Mets starter Sean Manaea leaves and Adrian Houser–the proud owner of a 7.88 ERA–comes on in relief, they open up.
“Why do they call him Houser? It’s because he brings all the runs home!”
“Houser you’re gonna learn a new word today! D-F-A!”
We’re losing it and we chime in to share stories about our trip. Everyone is very welcoming. We make jokes about the Mets, Pete Alonso, and of course St. Louis.
“What’s the three things I should do in St. Louis?” Alonso Guy asks.
“You should get toasted raviolis, go to the Arch, and get hit by a car,” I say. “It’s what St. Louis is best known for—doesn’t matter if it’s old, new, used—getting hit by a car is the ultimate St. Louis experience.”
Later in the game Ryan says to me, “These guys are just like us: gremlins.”
The Mets go down 3-1 and so does the energy in the park. The Mets aren’t good, they’re pretty awful. Despite beating our beloved Cardinals earlier in the month, they’ve since lost 12 of their last 14. They’re hurt and not playing well. Alonso shouts that ex-Cardinal Harrison Bader is “our best player!” this despite his sub .700 OPS. We tell them we’re really here for Bader, and in the 7th inning Ryan and Josh begin saying that Bader is going to come through for them.
“I’m calling it, bases loaded Bader is coming up and hitting a walk-off,” Ryan says. We laugh and then the Mets rally in the 9th and Harrison Bader comes up with the bases loaded. At this point we’ve joined our Mets brethren in chants of “LET’S GO METS” and “LET’S GO RANGERS” and Citi Field is alive again as Harrison Bader strokes a game-tying 2-run single. The next batter, Omar Narvaez, the proud possessor of a sub .400 OPS, rips a walk-off single and everyone loses their minds.
We spend the rest of the day walking around eating, drinking, farting. Nick meets up with us at Katz’s deli where we slam cream sodas and pastrami sandwiches. We go to Washington Square Park to look for Paul Giamatti, but our search comes up empty-handed. We go to the village and get in line for the Comedy Cellar, but Nick and I abandon Ryan and Josh and head back to the Air BNB. It’s been an exhausting day. It takes about two hours to navigate back to Queens. It’s hot and stuffy, the subway cars are air conditioned but the stations themselves are musty and smell of pee—full disclosure, do not let this dissuade you from visiting the city, the only thing that rocks harder than public transportation is summertime piss. We stop at a convenience store near the house and grab some sodas. Josh and Ryan don’t ever get into the Comedy Cellar, so they hit up an Irish bar to pay their respects to Ryan’s ancestors. On the way back they encounter a homeless woman in her 20s having a mental break on the subway. Josh says she was telling people about the codex.
In the morning we clean up and head to Cooperstown with Ryan driving. We stop outside of the city at a diner that was, clearly at one point, a Mexican restaurant but is now a lunch and breakfast stop. It’s called New Chesters and we spend most of our time gorging ourselves on pancakes and sausage joking about whatever happened to the Old Chesters? We gin up another banger when we start relating any innuendos to a nameless ex-wife. Example: A sign that says “ENDLESS MEATS FOUND HERE CALL XXX-XXX-XXXX” would prompt one of us to repeat the sign and say, “Sounds like my friggin’ ex-wife.”
It’s one of those you-have-to-be-there to get it jokes, but the bit is gonna stay with us the rest of the trip. Josh is a little high (having said he “smoked some of that blue weed”) and his laugh gets me going. For the next forty-five minutes we’re dancing between the ex-wife bit and whatever happened to Old Chester?
We head north and begin our trek to upstate New York. Everything east of the Rocky Mountains looks like your typical small town. Pennsylvania looked no different than the villages around Wheeling, West Virginia, which looked no different than Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, etc. Rural America has seen its fair share of brain drain and diaspora–take where we’re from the Congressional 8th District that encompasses all of Southeast and most of Central Missouri, the entire District saw population degrowth in every county but two.
We pass through a town called Downsville which creates another twenty minutes of problematic jokes. It’s Memorial Day weekend and every town has banners of past dead soldiers who died in combat. They’re hanging from street lights, stakes, and power line posts. Josh shouts out a banner he saw at Katz’s, “Send a salami to your boy in the army!”
These quaint little towns are reminiscent of what you’d read in a Richard Russo or Russell Banks novel. Clean, multi-storied homes that predate the World Wars that created all these dead veterans to valorize. Some of them are Gothic, Italianate, but mostly they’re Colonial Revival homes–wooden beams, handcrafted, and earthy color palettes. New York state is unique from everywhere else we’ve been, as all these communities are built in small valleys through the Adirondack Mountains. The entire landscape is overrun with brightly lush vegetation. The trees are huge and when peering out–from the many peaks we drove through–it almost appears as if there’s no ground beneath them, it’s as if you’re looking at one vast green carpet. I never felt so much like a bug when riding through here. It is marveling.
These communities also sport historic downtown areas, in every community we notice that each has an Italian restaurant.
“There are two types of Italians,” Nick said, “Those that live in New York City and those that are too conservative and they move upstate.”
We consider stopping into one but notice they’re all closed. Everything is closed. New York takes its Memorial Day seriously. We take a detour around a parade and pass through Walton, Trout’s Creek, and Bainbride. We hit I-88 and head to Oneonta, where our hotel is (Josh says, “this one is by far the shittiest one we’ll be in, but it was the only one they had that was within driving distance of the Hall of Fame.”)
We made the decision to not check-in and soldier through to Cooperstown.
I wish I could say that the entire experience invoked some kind of internal renaissance; that driving all this way was more than just a vacation, that it was really worth it. But the Baseball Hall of Fame is like any other museum.
It was fine, even good, but maybe not worth all that driving. If not for all the financial anxiety I may have a different perspective. I tell Ryan, “I probably won’t do this again, at least for maybe another thirty years.” He agrees with me. There’s nothing bad about it, the displays and memorabilia on display is astounding. But it’s something that should be experienced once.
We take the guide’s advice and start on the 2nd floor, which tells the story of baseball. We see old-timey scorecards, newspapers, baseballs, bats, and uniforms, and even racist caricatures. It’s worth noting, that the Baseball Hall of Fame is its own separate entity, and thus doesn’t acquiesce to some of what MLB wants you to ignore. There’s a whole section on McGwire and Sosa’s 1998 home run race, complete with a brief history of PEDs (Biogensis, Balco, the Mitchell Report, etc). The most glaring display is the section on black MLB players and the Negro Leagues—the best exhibit in the whole damn museum. A large swath of it highlights baseball’s institutional racism, and even acknowledges black players and social justice movements. The most anti-MLB one being a small display of Bruce Maxwell, the Oakland A’s catcher who showed solidarity with NFL athletes protesting police violence in 2017. The display also said that Maxwell’s decision cost him his career, as he was pushed out of baseball by MLB.
We watch a 17-minute montage video of MLB Hall of Famers vignettes–mainly talking about their careers in 10 second spurts. Dennis Eckersley draws loud laughs from us. His pearly white veneers, frazzled look, complete with his wide-eyed excitement leads to us joking that he was super coked out of his mind when he recorded this. Afterwards, we visit some of the other exhibits. The Latino section that highlights baseball in Central and South America, a separate one on Babe Ruth, and the Women’s exhibit. The latter of which is located where the bathrooms are.
We hit the third floor which is an ode to the fan. Pieces of stadiums are there, along with ticket gates, turnstiles, Cracker Jacks, baseball cards, Stat-O-Matic, video games, fantasy baseball playsheets and guide books. There’s a small stand that plays team songs (the Cardinal’s “Here Comes the King” was there). Deeper into the third floor there’s a locker room section of each team with donated items dotting their most recent historical accomplishments. The Cardinals locker has a glove from Yadier Molina, a dirty Paul Goldschmidt uniform, and Chris Carpenter’s 2011 World Series jersey. At the end of this exhibit are displays of last year’s inductees Scott Rolen and Fred McGriff.
Now the part that everyone comes for. On the first floor is the plaque exhibit. It is a mausoleum. High and arching marble walls and ceiling. This is why we drove over a thousand miles, it’s this section. Not the George Brett pine-tar bat, or Stan Musial’s 1963 locker, it’s the plaques. They’re somewhat out of order chronologically. On the left and right are sections ranging from whole decades to four or five year windows. All the Cardinals are here, I make sure to find and take photos of them. At the very end of the hall it opens up into an umbrella shaped room that contains everyone elected to the Hall from the 2000s. Dead center is the grandest display—the very first electees: Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, and Babe Ruth. As we’re reading each plaque Ryan says, “Can you imagine that. You do all this stuff in your career and it gets reduced down to a paragraph.”
We hit some of the shops and buy hats and keychains and shirts. We have no more room in the Rav-4, but we’ll make it work. We spent about four hours there and left, but really needed about eight more. We get back to Oneonta and find the only place still open is a Thai restaurant.
I guess we’ve reached the part of this journey that really matters. The part on the Taylor-Southgate Bridge where every scattered thought is pummeling my beer-laden brain, and the one that leaps out to me is how quick, but forever it would take to jump off into the Ohio. The trip to Cincinnati is boring; I drove the entire leg. We got New York style pizza in a heavily gentrified neighborhood. The hotel was gorgeous and spacious. We got drunk, went to the game the next day, got even drunker, ended up on TV, watched Furiosa later that night, woke up and packed our shit and went home. The game is nothing special. The Cards win 5-3, Nolan Gorman hits a homer and we end up on the broadcast. Bill DeWitt is seated twenty rows in front of us. When the game ends Josh says hi to him and says he should spend more money on the team. DeWitt looks at him with disgust.
I suppose in the face of sheer unrelenting terror and constant mental warfare, we’re all gazing down at our own personal Ohio River. Life is simply poverty and priceless experience that hold no value to anyone but yourself. For that this trip was worth it.
A night before in Oneonta we check into the shittiest Hampton Inn & Suites. The front desk guy is a man named Jerry. He is bald and has half a goatee—the bottom, to be exact. He says “excellent” after everything we say. He is very accommodating and nice. The room is $279 for the night, but he’ll later discount it to $179.
In our room we’re watching the NBA conference finals. Ryan pops up from the bed and says he’s gonna have room service send us up some extra blankets and pillows. It’s here that we reach the Cooperstown Trip’s summit–and I suppose this story’s in media res ending. It’s not visiting Baseball Mecca and standing in the copper molded presence of legends, but this moment that brings us closer to God than anything we’ve yet to witness. Jerry picks up the phone, Ryan starts to talk.
“Tell him it’s for the gay room,” I joke.
“AND WHY AREN’T YOU HERE?” Nick barks, aggressively and without missing a beat.
Something in all of us breaks. Ryan is laughing on the phone. Josh is cackling like a black woman—his words, not mine—and I’m wheezing. You likely won’t find this funny, it’s one of those “you had to have been there to get it” kind of moments. But the sheer simplicity of calling someone and with the same tonal annoyance as a Chinese restaurateur taking an order, shouting “GAY ROOM WHY AREN’T YOU HERE?” It’s a joke so perfectly stupid and nonsensical that it leaves us deconstructing it for the next hour. A joke that perfectly captured the exhaustion, chaos, and calamity of driving thousands of miles to stare at some plaques of mostly dead motherfuckers. The human mind is the most complicated computing machine ever conceived and this stupid joke is a chaff grenade.
It’s a joke that we constantly reference on the way home and will likely reference until the day we die. A joke we shout out at the Cardinals game and when we’re taking a leak. A joke we’ll think about at our jobs, home, and with our loved ones. A mind-numbing joke that we’ll fail in explaining to people what makes it so funny, and how we won’t even be frustrated in our inability at explaining it. We’ll simply just laugh and say, “You simply had to be there.”
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